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Information Systems, Games and Gamification

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New journal publication on designing gamified applications for sports

How can digital systems motivate people to engage in sports and physical activity in the long term? This question is addressed by Sandra Birnstiel and Benedikt Morschheuser in their recent article “Incorporating trait, domain, and state-layers into motivational design in sports: a multilayer perspective on motivation”, published in the journal Behaviour & Information Technology.

In the paper, we explore motivation in sports from a multilayer perspective. While many existing approaches primarily focus on short-term and situational motivational factors, we argue that sustainable motivational design should also consider stable personality traits as well as domain-specific sports motivations. Our goal is to better tailor motivational systems to individual needs and different sports contexts.

Based on a quantitative study with 338 participants, we identified five motivational factors: “Social Esteem”, “Personal Growth”, “Community Care”, “Ambition”, and “Independence”. Our findings further reveal substantial differences between team and individual athletes as well as across demographic groups.

Building on these findings, we derive design recommendations for motivational sports and fitness systems. Team athletes, for example, benefit particularly from social and competitive mechanics, whereas individual athletes are more strongly motivated by personal growth, progress visualisation, and individual goal setting. For physically inactive individuals, we recommend supportive structures, flexible personalisation, and autonomy-oriented designs.

The study contributes novel insights to research on gamification, motivational information systems, and personalised digital health applications.

The open-access publication is available here:
https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2026.2678383